#3 Stoic practice: the outside view

This series of articles is my feedback on A Handbook for New Stoics, a book on the practice of Stoicism, by Massimo Pigliucci and Gregory Lopez. For one year, every week, I will experience the Stoic practices proposed by the handbook and I will share with you my weekly review. This will provide you with an overview of the different Stoic exercises and the benefits (or not) they can offer you.

💬 The quote (Epictetus)

It is in our power to discover the will of nature from those matters on which we have no difference of opinion. For example, when another man’s slave has broken the wine cup, we are very ready to say once, ‘Such things must happen.’ Know then that when your own cup is broken, you ought to behave in the same way as when your neighbor’s was broken. Apply the same principle to higher matters. Is another’s child of wife dead? Not one of us but would say, ‘Such is the lot of man’; but when one’s own dies, straightaway one cries, ‘Alas! miserable am I.’ But we ought to remember what our feelings are when we hear it of another.”

Epictetus, Enchiridion, 26

🔥 The practice: talking to myself, using “you”

The exercise was to write for at least 5 minutes each day about a difficulty I had encountered that day or a concern I had…